Saturday, August 22, 2009

Just a few hours ago, I arrived home after a very quiet and peaceful two-week holiday with my family. It was great! I didn't bring a computer on purpose. I brought a mobile phone, but didn't answer that on purpose too :) Result: absolute relaxation, with lots of time to hike, cycle, and read, and occasional visits to musea and historic sites. Bliss :)

Anyway, now that the bags are unpacked, and the kids are asleep, it's time to face the dragon better known as my inbox. What I found brought a big smile to my face:

Jos and I hope the book will be useful to everybody that wants to get started with Pentaho. We tried to strike the right balance between general BI/Datawarehousing theory and realizing practical solutions using Pentaho. The intention is to allow people that are familiar with database technology but not datawarehousing to get the proper grounding and achieve almost immediate results. At the same time, we think the book will be a real time saver for experienced BI professionals that are not yet familiar with how to get things done with Pentaho.

I sincerely hope our readers will give us and Wiley feedback to let us know if we succeeded and if we can improve our work. Personally, I think we touch upon plenty topics that could fill an in-depth book in themselves. But, since this is pretty much the first Pentaho book in print, we'll just have to see if there is demand for that.

Thanks for your kind words, I really appreciate it. Perhaps when you read it and are still happy, (and can if you can find the time :), you can write a review on Amazon? Let me know if you do, and I'll buy you a beer :) Of course, if you aren't happy, let me know too - beers would still be on me in that case :)

I live in Brazil and got your book just today. As soon as I had the chance, I started browsing through it.

So for, there's one little problem that I'd like to point out:

On page 9, where you mention the Steel Wheels and BI Developer Examples, it only states that both solutions should show up on the browser, but that's not the case. By default, the only solution loaded by the BI Server is the Steel Wheels one.

I'll keep reading on, but just thought I should point that out.

Anyways, 'tis just one minor issue. I still believe that the book was a great idea and I'm really looking forward to reading the whole thing.

I'm just starting some work with Pentaho DI and your book looks pretty awesome - just what I need. Only problem for me is that I really try hard to not buy paper books for various reasons (high cost of shipping to Australia [our bookstores here are notoriously slow at getting new book], searchability & trees!) and was wondering if you know if Wiley are planning a PDF version that we can buy???

thanks for the interest! Part III of "Pentaho Solutions" is all about DI/ETL. It contains three chapters covering concepts and introduction, ETL/DI design, and deployment: more than 122 pages alltogether.

But of course, ETL/DI is a very broad subject, Pentaho Data Integration has a lot of functionality, so we're still just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg. I do think it's a pretty good start though.

the book covers the community edition pf Pentaho 3.5. We do have a few paragraphs here and there to inform the reader about additional functionality present in the enterprise edition. But we developed and executed all code samples and how-to's on the early builds of the 3.5 release of the community edition.

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About Me

I'm Roland Bouman (@rolandbouman on twitter). I'm a software (web) application developer and I work on both the front end as well as the back end. I do data modeling, database design, ETL, Analytics, and Business Intelligence.